Paid To Create Podcast
Fireside chats with some of today’s best and brightest Creators
Welcome to Paid To Create, a podcast that features insightful conversations with some of today's most successful entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Join us as we delve into the minds of coaches, consultants, agencies, and experts from various industries to discuss their experiences, strategies, and journeys to success.
Our guests have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in their respective fields and will share their insights on what it takes as a creator to build and grow a successful business.
Each episode is a chance to gain practical advice and inspiration from those who have been through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
Our goal is to provide valuable insights and actionable tips to help you take your business to the next level.
Paid To Create Podcast
S2E4 Q&A: Marketing, Messaging, and Making Money
Is it possible to transform the way you think about marketing expenses? Explore innovative strategies with us as we challenge the misconception that effective marketing for small businesses must break the bank. Promising you a new perspective, we discuss the benefits of acquiring marketing skills independently versus outsourcing to experts. With practical examples, such as assessing podcast production costs, we illustrate how to view marketing as an investment with potential high returns rather than a burdensome expense.
Discover how service providers, like chiropractors, can reclaim their time and maintain income through unconventional strategies. We introduce the concept of "selling your sawdust," a creative approach that involves monetizing unique knowledge and systems developed over time. This strategy not only offers additional revenue streams but also provides a pathway to achieving a sustainable work-life balance, liberating professionals from the constraints of a packed schedule without sacrificing their financial stability.
Authenticity can build a community, and we explain how documenting your genuine experiences can foster a supportive tribe on social media. By sharing personal stories and insights, you can cultivate an engaged audience that backs your business ventures. We stress the importance of maintaining sales and revenue, especially during tough economic periods, and offer strategies to maximize advertising investments to stand out in a crowded market. Learn how prioritizing proactive sales efforts and leveraging personal authenticity can help your business thrive, even in challenging times.
All right, welcome everyone to this week's episode of Paid to Create. I'm AJ Roberts and my co-host, sarah, is not here today. She is off jet-setting around the world enjoying herself. So we have a couple of style of episodes we do. We sometimes have the two of us and we'll talk about current topics and go through that. Sometimes we'll do an interview with a guest and sometimes we do Q&A. This episode is going to be a Q&A episode and Ryan, who's behind the camera, is going to ask the questions. And you know, if you haven't you know subscribed to the podcast, make sure to do that. You can do that on your favorite podcast platform or go to paidtocreatecom. You subscribe there so that way you don't miss any of these episodes. So, anyway, ryan, what's that first question we got today?
Speaker 2:all right. Hey, aj. I'm sarah from portland, oregon. I run a small business and I've been struggling to figure out the right marketing strategy. I've researched social media experts, email marketing specialists and advertising experts, but everything seems expensive and I'm not sure where to start. How can I move forward without breaking the bank?
Speaker 1:Man, you did not sound like Sarah.
Speaker 2:You could have put some more effort into that?
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's a great question. So, basically, I need to expand the business. I'm looking at different marketing avenues and they're expensive. And what should I do? So the truth is, in these situations, you have two choices, right? Choice number one is you learn it and do it yourself, and for most people, that's the route they decide to go, and it's good, in a sense, that if you don't know how to do something, it's sometimes hard to hire someone and know if what they're doing is going to work. And so oftentimes, if you're hiring blind to the the job that they're going to be whether it's an agency, whether it's an employee, whether it's an outsource person for projects if you don't know what needs to be done, sometimes you're going to go through a lot of different people until you find someone that's going to work right, always talks about this hire quick, fire, faster, right. And that is a path that you would have to take if you decided you know you're not going to learn about it, you're just going to outsource it. Obviously, the way around that is to understand what it is you need to get done, and in doing so, I think it will shift your perspective in terms of like it being expensive, because this idea of it being expensive, expensive, it's a wrong mindset, and the reason I share that is because the truth is is, if it's your business, it's an investment that is supposed to bring you a return on that investment. So the question is is how much are you willing to spend in order to get an ROI right? And so, anybody you hire, there should be a number, a budget that they have or a timeframe they have. If they're going to be creating let's say, they're doing your social media and you're paying them, you should have a time frame, whether it's 60 days, 90 days, six months, whatever. That is that you're willing to invest. And then, if there's no ROI, you're going to pull out right. And so when you look at these things, oftentimes the prices sometimes seem expensive.
Speaker 1:But let me give you an example. We're recording the podcast right now. The time it takes to do the podcast is only a fraction of the time it takes to produce, edit, publish, promote the podcast. So if we were going to rent out the studio for other people and they said, well, how much is it? And we said, oh, it's 10,000 a day, and that includes all post-production, all clips, everything like that that come with it. Most people are going to be like that's expensive, 10 grand a day. Because the positioning in their mind is I'm only going to be in the podcast, I'm going to be in the podcast studio for maybe two, three hours for 10 grand.
Speaker 1:But they don't understand everything else that goes into that right and that's something that most business owners don't get. They say they want a webinar, someone to write a webinar for them, and they don't understand what goes into creating a webinar that converts. Right? You could go to ChatGDP, ask it to create you a webinar. You could even upload, you know, a webinar script, the perfect webinar script, or another script that you can get available. Is it going to work? Maybe Do you know why it's going to work, why it's not going to work? Probably not.
Speaker 1:Whereas if you're hiring someone, the assumption is they do know right, and so a lot of people now adding guarantees because they believe in what they're doing. But that's something to you know. If you are nervous, if you are worried about the investment not returning money to you, you can see what those guarantees are. Is someone willing to do that? Because there's also the value that that person is providing to you that you're not taking into account. If I'm paying them just for the hours they work, fantastic. But if I'm paying them for the transformation they bring in terms of a bunch of money that's coming in, you know, if you pay $25,000 for someone to write you a webinar and you go do that webinar and you sell $150,000 worth of stuff, that's a pretty good return on investment. Now the problem is is, if you have the webinar but you don't have the audience, well, now it's a different issue. Now we need the right audience, so now we need the traffic.
Speaker 1:So again, you have to understand, first of all, who you're hiring. You have to understand what they're going to do and what the actual work is, not what it seems like the work is. And then, beyond that, you have to understand are you actually hiring for an entire marketing campaign or you're just hiring for a segment? Because if you're hiring for a segment let's say you're hiring for someone to write your emails, or you're hiring for someone to run your ads, or you're hiring someone to write a webinar for you or any other promotion do you have the other pieces of that that matter, right? If you want to get leads and someone's like I can give you all the leads that you want, but you don't have a follow-up system to close those leads, meaning you don't have email automations in place, you don't have sales reps that are going to call those people to set sales calls.
Speaker 1:If you don't have these processes in place, well, you're going to think, oh, these are bad leads because you don't really have any way to convert them. Maybe you have a landing page or like a sales page, or you know not even that maybe it's an e-com store. So you have a product or a couple of products and you're like oh, they're not buying it. Well, that's trying to get someone to go from completely cold to sold. You know, without effort. That's not how marketing works, that's not how sales work, that's not how conversions work. So you have to understand the process. So my advice would be to understand what it is you're hiring for in terms of what that actually means. Right, like, if you say you want a new website, they're going to want. Okay, can you provide the about page and the copy for the about page? They don't know who you are. Well, if you want someone else to do that, they're going to have to interview you and they're going to have to write that.
Speaker 1:So there's processes that go into these, what seem like to most people very, very simple things. And so, as a business owner or the marketing director or whoever is responsible, oftentimes if you've not done it yourself, you don't understand what goes into it. And when you don't understand what goes into it, it seems like it's a cost, not an investment, because you don't understand the potential that it could get you. Sure, if you want to hire someone to post on your social media so you have a presence, fantastic. But if you want to hire someone that's going to turn social media followers into clients, that's going to cost you, because that level of skill, that level of knowledge has cost them. And so you're not paying for them to just do the task. You're paying for their experience and their know-how on how to actually get you the results you want.
Speaker 1:And again, the problem is there's a bunch of people out there who cannot get your results. There is a bunch of people out there who don't even try to get your results right. They just take your money. So you have to do good due diligence. But I go back to what I said earlier about Gary V and his sentiments on hiring people Hire people fast, but make sure that they're qualified, they meet all the things, but fire them faster, because if you know, as soon as you see a red flag, as soon as you see something not happening and that could be as simple as this they say we're going to do research for the first week, right Week rolls around and maybe you don't get an email from them.
Speaker 1:That's the first red flag. They missed their first deadline. So you can set benchmarks and you can even pay based on those benchmarks. If you have a cash flow issue, a lot of people will work with you, but you have to understand that someone who's really, really good, they're not the risk. They know what needs to happen to help you.
Speaker 1:You're the risk because they don't know what you're going to provide them right, and so a lot of people's prices are based on what they know needs to be done, not on what you think needs to be done or what you want to be done. They're going to deliver what's going to get you results, because otherwise they're probably not going to be in business very long. And again, unfortunately, there's a bunch of people out there who aren't like that, and so sometimes you have to kind of weed through. You know the charlatans and the people who are not qualified that are able to present themselves like that because of the time we live in, with social media and things like that. But trust me, it is worth figuring this out because at the end of the day, you are always going to be a bottleneck if you're always taking things on good stuff, man fired up, all right.
Speaker 2:Question two comes comes from Jason in Austin, a successful chiropractor, but I'm feeling overwhelmed working around the clock. How can I take what I know and monetize it in a way that frees up my time? What's the best way to buy back my time while still serving my clients?
Speaker 1:That's a fantastic question. I think most service providers end up in this situation. Whether you're a chiropractic, whether you're a fitness trainer, whether you're a dentist anybody that essentially is the expert themselves. If you're good at what you do, you're going to end up having a schedule where you're full right, and then you're trading hours for dollars. The simple way out of that, if you didn't want to change anything of your business model, is obviously to hire other people to replace you, right, so that's an opportunity right there. The trouble with that is is oftentimes that those people they're not necessarily as skilled or qualified as you. You fall into the trap, potentially like, instead of stepping back and buying back your time, you just fill their schedule too. So now you both have a full schedule. Granted, now you're going to be making more money as a business, but you're still overwhelmed. And now they're overwhelmed, and so you, just now you're in a game of how many people can we hire, and that includes then how do we manage these people? Then there's issues of HR, there's issues of leadership and, depending on your skill set, I don't know from the question how confident you are to do that. A lot of people. They don't want to build a team, a lot of people. They like what they have and they want to be the expert, and so, obviously, you can raise your rates. That's a simple way to continue to bring in more money without giving up anything or changing anything. The problem again is you're still going to be overwhelmed. You're still going to be working 40 hours plus a week, and that's if you're working in the business. How many hours are you working on the business? I'm not really sure. So these are things that you've got to take into consideration.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I believe is a big opportunity for so many people that I would consider experts or masters at their craft is something that I heard this saying. I know Ian didn't create this from Ian Stanley. It is sell your sawdust, and the concept of this is is if you have a successful business, I would guess that you have a system or a process or you have some something unique that you created right, and it's going to be different for everybody. For some people, it might be marketing campaigns that they run right, and a lot of people outsource that. So that might not be it. For some people, it might be the sales process that they take the patient client through in order to become a paying client. For others, it might be the actual practice of the craft, right. So it might be the way you program if you're a trainer, the way you do your chiropractic if you're a chiropractor, the way you massage if you're a massage therapist. You may have. Obviously, in all these situations you've learned from other people, but if you've taken what you've learned and created kind of your own system, you have some IP there. It might be the way you onboard your clients. It may be the customer experience that you give them and what you do throughout the year to retain those members.
Speaker 1:My point is, if you've been successful, there is a high chance that there is intellectual property that you own in your mind. Maybe you have some stuff on paper, some standard operating procedures, things like that, but you can take that and package it in a way that you can then sell to other professionals in your industry to help them have the success you have. Because, just like you were probably 10, 20 years ago, there is people just beginning their journey. There's people just starting that don't know what you know, that don't have the 20 years experience, who have not tried the 17 different ways to get a chiropractic lead that you have and you know the three that work every single time, right? So you have to think of it like that. You know we record this podcast here and we know the whole process of it, our sort of moment on could. We could take how to create and produce and publish a podcast and turn that into a product, because we're doing it every single day, right?
Speaker 1:So this concept of selling your sawdust what is it that you have that if you packaged up and sold, would bring extra revenue, then would allow you to basically buy back your time, because most of the reason, because most of the time when people ask this question, you can buy back your time by just giving up clients, but you lose income and so you're probably living in a lifestyle that you don't want to change.
Speaker 1:You don't want to lose the income Packaging up your knowledge and then selling it to again other professionals, or it could even be to end users, like if you have a low back solution that is unique, so it doesn't have necessarily be to other professionals, but it could be what you're doing. Could you sell it to the masses? And now you can go and you can and put it up and you can sell it and again you're going to have additional revenue. That additional revenue can now supplement revenue and you can kind of back off the clients Because I guarantee, like in your client base you probably have some clients you don't necessarily want but also you could raise your prices. You're going to lose some clients. You'll keep the money, work less hours, but now you're supplementing that. Or you have this other business that you could essentially grow and it doesn't take your time, the way that your practice does. So hopefully that helps and if you end up packaging your sawdust and selling it, let us know.
Speaker 2:That's brilliant. Selling your sawdust is so good. All right. Question three this is an email from Mike from Detroit. In the current economy, a lot of businesses are struggling to stay afloat. If you could recommend one area to focus on right now, where should business owners be putting their energy to ensure they survive and thrive?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question. I think people have been looking at this for the last few years. You know, we're kind of we're in a recession, but we're not because of subsidies and all these different things. So I think and I'm just going to speak in generalities I think most business owners the truth is is most business owners don't focus on the right things anyway. Right, and some of that comes as you grow. There's more things that you have to worry about. So your mind comes off of how much traffic are we getting? What is our conversion rate? How many sales are we getting? How do we improve that? Because, depending on how you want to run your business, right, you can be a capitalist, you can be a conscious capitalist. You know you could be for profit whatever of nonprofit, all these different things.
Speaker 1:But the truth is, without cash flow, no business survives. Right, and even if you borrow money like, there's businesses out there that when they run out of money, they just go raise money. Right, because they have an incredible idea and other people believe in it and there's a tipping point in everyone's mind that if they just cross this threshold, the money's going to come back to everybody. So there's ways that people do get money, even when they run out of money. But if they don't solve the cash flow issue, they run out of that money. And then they got to do another round and eventually nobody wants to give them money anymore because it's either so diluted that there's not enough meat on the bone to get involved, or they just look at it and they say they have not figured out a model to monetize right. And so a lot of these companies, these unicorns, even if they sell for a billion dollars, yeah, the owner gets rich, but then to continue the business, what happens Immediately? They have to figure out revenue. Right, immediately, they have to figure out revenue.
Speaker 1:So what I would say in situations like this is you need to be focused daily on the revenue that is coming in and you need to understand what's going to increase that revenue, right, sales, money collected all of that is a byproduct of everything you do, so you can't really just hope to get more sales. You have to do something to get more sales, more sales than equals more money, right. And so in these situations, people are kind of they freeze and they just kind of wait and they hope to ride it out. And the problem with that is is, while you're waiting to ride it out, you end up going backwards because the marketplace and the people who are looking for a solution, you're not showing up in front of them. They're going to your competitors who are willing to take a risk during this economic downturn and for them and you'll hear this a lot of business owners I'm not having no problems with economic downturn because they're not operating their business from a place of scarcity, they're not operating on a day-to-day basis that they have to hold money. They're going out and saying well, ads are cheaper right now because the competition is backed off of running ads. I'm going to go deeper with ads and I'm going to go harder and I'm going to figure this out. And so we're human. Fear is a very natural state that we tend to go in multiple times a day, even if we don't recognize it. The reality is that worst case scenario recession or no recession, worst case scenario you fail, the business fails, you claim, claim bankruptcy, and then you're at zero and you start again. In that situation, what did you actually lose? Well, you lost the business you had. You didn't lose the skills, the knowledge, the experience you've acquired along the way. So actually not in a bad place. You're just having to figure out how to take what you have and actually monetize it, because maybe you didn't do a good job with your own business and we see people think of it like this.
Speaker 1:Collegiate coaches in football often go up to the NFL to coach and they don't do very well and they go back to collegiate football. In fact, the winningest collegiate football coach, nick Saban, has done this. When he went to the NFL, he sucked as an NFL coach. Now, a lot of that wasn't him. It was to do with the attitude of the players, the respect they gave him and the difference between college kids and their commitment to a program versus an NFL athlete as a paid professional's. Commitment to their team right, and so he struggled. So he went back to commitment to their team right, and so he struggled. So he went back to the collegiate level right, you could say, well, he failed. He sucks as a coach. He wasn't able to coach at the highest level. Or you can look at it for what it is he is the winningest. I believe he is, if not the winner, one of the greatest college coaches ever to coach the game.
Speaker 1:And you may not be a great business owner and you may fail, but you may be really good at something that you can then go and do either that as a business or go into someone else's business. So the reason I'm trying to paint the picture here is most of the reason we don't go forward in these situations is the fear of failure, right, but the truth is is you're probably not going to end up homeless on a corner like begging for change, because you have an energy about you. You have something in you that is driven to succeed. So just because the world is in chaos doesn't mean you need to be in chaos, right, doesn't mean your business needs to be in chaos. And so ignore all of the stuff that people think makes a great business and just focus on what matters most, right. And if you have a big business and you have people who are doing that well, you still want to make sure they're focusing on it.
Speaker 1:Because I was just talking to a member of a marketing team today and I asked how things were going and the response was like, well, I think they're going okay. We don't really get much feedback. And I was like wait, you guys aren't looking at the traffic and sales together as a group? And she said, no, right. And so you, as a CEO, if you have a company and you have other people responsible for revenue, other people responsible for marketing, other people responsible for sales, they might not be passing or sharing the information with the reps or with the agents or with the team members, and so if you're the CEO, maybe you're not getting that information shared with you either. So you've got to have your finger on the pulse of the stuff that's going to keep the business alive. Everything else, that's what you want to put other people in charge of, because you probably don't want to deal with HR, you probably don't want to deal with operations, you probably don't want to deal with payroll and things like that.
Speaker 1:And so what got you the initial success? Kind of staying lean, being scrappy, you know, focusing on sales. That is where I think you need to go in these times. That is the mistake I believe people make in these times is they start worrying about things that make no difference, like right now. If you're struggling in business, creating a standard operating procedure is absolutely useless unless you're planning on hiring someone else to come in and you need the SOP in order for them to learn how to do the job. But you can do that by hiring them, teaching them and recording you training them, because then you learn how to do the job. But you can do that by hiring them, teaching them and recording you training them, because then you only have to do it one time and you kill two birds with one stone.
Speaker 1:So my point is make sure you're focused on the things that keep the business alive, which, in my opinion, for 90% of businesses out there sales and marketing is the area that most makes a difference, customer experience being the third, you know, leg of the stool, you know, if you want long-term success, right, marketing and sales is front-end. Customer experience is back-end selling. You have those three pillars. You focus on those three things. Everything else you can then pay somebody else to worry about.
Speaker 1:Because the truth is, if you don't know how to make money, then what business are you really in? Because the purpose of a business is to generate money to then do something with. And again, even if you're a nonprofit organization, without money you can't do your nonprofit that you are committed to. So the more money you have as a charity, the more money you can give, right. And so I heard this said about Mother Teresa once she never had a meeting, a lunch, she never interacted with anyone without trying to get a check for them, for her organization, and that is why what made her one of the most successful, like giving people to ever, ever live. So my point is as a business owner, sometimes you have to get scrappy, roll up your sleeves, get in the weeds on the things that matter most, which, in my opinion, are marketing, sales and customer experience.
Speaker 2:It's nice dude. I had no idea Mother Teresa was a G like that.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Final question. This comes from Nicole. Here in San Diego, I've heard you talk about the importance of creating a tribe or a loyal community around your brand. How do I go about building that type of following from scratch when I'm just starting out with a small audience?
Speaker 1:Whew, this could be a whole episode. We have to maybe have this as an episode, but short answer is this People follow people who are unafraid to be themselves, who demonstrate a life or dedication commitment that they wish they had. So what I mean by that is the reason a lot of celebrities you follow don't just post about the work they do. They post about their food, their diet, where they're going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is to show you. It's like reality TV, right, it's to show you like the life that they're living and they hope to inspire you, to motivate you or to get you to essentially consume whatever it is that they are promoting, whether it's a movie, whether it's a fragrance, you know, beauty line, whatever it is. And so when you're first starting out and you don't have many resources and you're making posts and things like that, like just document and again, this is Gary Vee's language but just document your life through social, because so many people are afraid to do it Just by doing it you actually set yourself apart, right? I don't know the numbers, but most people are terrified of public speaking. So the fact that you can turn a camera on and speak immediately separates you from most people but immediately also makes people look at you as a leader, look at you as someone to follow, right. And the reason that you want to build a tribe and you want it to be around who you truly are is because obviously you don't want to attract people who think you're one thing and then you're not right. Then there's going to be in your mind this like I'm a fraud mentality, right, I could get found out. So you want to limit that as much as possible. You limit it by as much as possible by not creating a false sense of reality, and you'll probably can look at the people that you follow, who have the biggest following, and you can kind of start to identify that the majority of their posts are not about the thing they're trying to monetize. The majority of their posts are just them sharing their life in some way, shape or form. And you can manufacture that towards what it is. You're selling.
Speaker 1:Case in point, one of my friends and I'll get him back on the podcast Simon Lovell. He's been on before but he got super into pickleball and then turn that into his business. So, like everything he does promotes the business. But him playing pickleball is not him trying to sell someone on buying his product. It's just a part of his every day, right, and and sharing, like when he does his networking groups, he's sharing that, them playing pickleball. He's not trying to sell you into the networking group.
Speaker 1:Now you might get FOMO, you might want to go to that, you might be like, well, that's really cool, I want to do that in my hometown, but he doesn't have to say that, right, and so he is doing this consistently. Uh, same with people who go to the gym and record themselves working out and post clips and talk through their workouts and things like that. Again, they build followings and you don't need millions of followers to have a powerful tribe. Really, about 10,000 people and you can make so much money that you're know, you're content, you're happy, you can live the life of your dreams. So, again, a lot of people think 100,000, 200,000. What you need is 10,000 engaged followers and you don't do that by trying to, you know, blanket get tons of people who are not relevant to you to follow you.
Speaker 1:So, you know, stay true to who you are. Talk about the things that you're interested in, Share your actual opinions. Don't be afraid to hold back, because polarization is something that people are attracted to. You know people don't like to. It's hard to follow someone who's just in the middle right. It's hard to follow someone who goes back and forth and is kind of blasé fait. You need someone who's willing to stand for something right, because they have those beliefs in them, they have those desires, those wants. All of the things that you portray is an example to them of what's possible, right.
Speaker 1:And even if you don't have it all figured out and you're on your journey, one of the things that I wish I had had when I was training at Westside Barbell to become a, you know, as a professional powerlifter, to to become the world record holder, I wish I had documented the whole thing, not only for myself but for other people, to see the actual progress I went through, to see the battles, to see the challenges, to see how many mornings I didn't want to get out of bed because I couldn't stand up straight because my back was so jacked from squatting a thousand pounds. Right, these things would be awesome to have had and to have shared. Social media wasn't even there around at that time. Facebook was, but I don't think even video was was around. Youtube YouTube came out I can't remember what year. It was um, but, but it wasn't like me. I didn't really know how to shoot videos and stuff like that, and people weren't really YouTubers or anything like that. But my point is is now in our pocket we have a camera and we can film at any point in time, and even I should do a better job of documenting stuff. I should do a better job of documenting stuff.
Speaker 1:But if you want to build a tribe, and once you have the tribe, they'll pretty much follow you whatever direction you go and whatever you decide to do, they'll get behind right, and you see this with different people who they'll have a clothing brand, and then they also will have a supplement line, and then they'll have a you know um, a beauty line, and then they'll have a product or a course. So the, the tribe, is what's important, not the thing that you you necessarily going to promote or sell, um. But you know, it's why influencers have become 60 of the sales force for products and people listen to influencers more than they watch ads or purchase from magazine ads or TV ads or things like that. They're purchasing more and more from influencers. But it's not because the person's an influencer, it's because they have a tribe of fans that follow them, who interact with them, who engage with them, who are, in essence, the influencer, has become a part of their day-to-day life. So, when it comes to influence, when it comes to opinions, when it comes to news topics, like they want to hear that from the person they follow, the person they look up to the most, the person they admire, the person that they kind of want to assimilate and become. They want to become their own version, but they like what you have or what you're doing, and they often want to have that kind of result for themselves or a similar result, right?
Speaker 1:So, starting out, just document everything. Don't be afraid to, you know, overshare, just share. Just put your life out there. Again, you don't have to put it. You can keep things private. It's not like you have to put everything out there, like a lot of people aren't putting their family on there and their wives and their children and all those different things. So it's not like you have to constantly share every single moment, but you have enough on a day-to-day basis where you can make, like, several stories, you can make a post. There's no reason you can't do that.
Speaker 1:And look, the biggest secret that nobody ever wants to tell anybody, because nobody's going to pay for this information. The biggest secret is that it's a game of time, and so you know, expect to do this for 10 years to get the payoff that you think you're going to get quicker, right, and so if you do this for the next 10 years, you will have everything you want. But nobody likes to think in terms of that long. They want it in the next six months, the next year. And look, some people have the ability to do that. Some people are A plus students in school and they never even study, and other people study every single day, have a tutor, their parents pay all this money to try to get them to understand a certain topic better and they still get C's, d's, e's and F's right. That's life. So, yeah, there is people who, in one year, start a YouTube channel or start an Instagram or start a TikTok and blow up because they have charisma, they have experience. Usually those people have 20 years experience. They've just not transferred it.
Speaker 1:When you're brand new, like, you're going to struggle, you're going to face adversity, you're going to have moments of things that you weren't prepared for, like online haters and criticism and all these different things, and the truth is is that you go through all of that and you keep going and eventually it's all going to come and pay off. But it's like the book Three Feet from Gold, like people will dig and dig and dig and dig and they get closer and closer and closer to the gold. But it's so hard and it's so difficult and they want to quit. And a lot of people quit, right, when they should go even deeper, right, and if they just gone a couple more steps and just dug a little bit deeper, then the payoff would have been there. And so just know, going into it, that you know, don't expect a hundred thousand views, a million views when you first get started, right.
Speaker 1:But if you go from one view and I have a, a client who we started doing a lot more video with, and when he first started posting he got zero views and now he'll get 400 views, 200 views, sometimes he'll get one or two views He'll have a video that you know, zero views, probably posted at the wrong time algorithm didn't pick it up, whatever but he's playing the game and by playing the game he's getting feedback. By getting feedback he can improve his content and he can see what worked? What didn't work? Why did this take off? What was the hook? What was the information? So playing the game is where you're going to learn, is where you're going to improve. Standing on the sidelines watching everybody else doing it, waiting for the right moment, it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of building your tribe, you build your tribe by putting yourself out there, allowing people to like-minded people to follow you, and I've seen people build tribes in crochet. My wife's a crocheter and she follows different people on Instagram and she'll send me stuff because it's hilarious you know what someone can make out of crochet and she'll send cute stuff to me, either to laugh or, you know, maybe I should make this for the kids. And I'll sometimes click and look at the profile and the person has like 250,000 followers, right? I don't know a single other person that crochets in our friend group other than my wife. But there is a girl on Instagram with quarter of a million people who are paying attention to her, buying her patterns that she's creating, liking, commenting on her posts.
Speaker 1:So again, you just have to give it time, you have to allow people to find you and eventually it's all going to pay off. But I would say you got to give it long enough to do that. You can set that time. Maybe you're not willing to do it for 10 years, I don't know. But I can tell you mastery comes over time and there's very few ways you can shortcut it.
Speaker 1:Most overnight success is someone who has been banging their head against the wall for a decade or more who suddenly figures out just a tweak, just a turn that allows them to come out and people say, wow, how did you do that? And so I've been trying to do it for the last decade and you know, we finally figured it out. So give yourself time, give yourself patience, give yourself grace, you know, because it's not going to be easy and you're going to make mistakes. But being in the game, being a player, is way better than standing on the sidelines wondering and look if you're going to make mistakes. But being in the game, being a player, is way better than standing on the sidelines wondering and look if you're lost when it comes to what you should actually do.
Speaker 1:Use ChatGTP and tell it what you want to do and ask it to give you a plan. It's not going to be the very best plan you could possibly come up with, but following something is better than shooting from the hip. So you know there's tools and there's other things out there that do that too. But you know, leverage the tools that are available to you to at least start to learn. You know, go to youtube, look on videos like constantly. You know, learn, learn, learn, learn when you have the money, invest, because it's a quicker way to learn, because it's, you know, curated and it's where you are right now. Invest in things. They're going to help you move to that next step. But at the end of the day, you're not going to learn the game unless you start beautiful stuff.
Speaker 2:Can I ask a quick follow-up question? Yep I was looking at nicole's profile while you were speaking there. I can't say that she's been doing this for 10 years, but she seems to have been relatively consistent, documenting her life and all that. Would it be useful for her to do any advertising or like promotion of her content to spend some money?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So two things there. One of the things like I'm a direct response marketer, so I don't like to do anything unless there's a reason to do it. Okay, like to build a tribe. To build a tribe doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1:So the first thing if you don't have it already is you have to have a way to move them from social media to the medium that you want in order to be able to communicate with them. Right now, social media has things like a Facebook group, has things like a subscription on an Instagram. I don't know if you can have it free, free subscription but you can have a private group on those. Or you can move them off into your email. You could move them off into text message, depending on how you want to communicate. Move them off into text message, depending on how you want to communicate. So that's the first thing is having a reason for them to give you to join. Whatever it is you want them to take that next step with you. That's the first thing that you should have in place, because if you're going to run advertising, you don't want to just run advertising to increase your following count, right? You want to run advertising to I'm guessing, to help you sell something, whether something, whether it's your stuff maybe you're an affiliate selling other people's stuff, I'm not sure. But what I would look at if you have been doing it is what are your most popular videos, right? What are the most popular videos you've done? And then just run like five bucks a day of traffic to it for video views and see and set yourself a budget, right? I think the biggest mistake people make when they run advertising is they again going back to what I said earlier about cost versus investment. When they run ads, they think, oh, you know, like it's going to cost me this much. Hopefully I make money. No, no, no, you should look at it like I'm willing to invest 500 bucks, right? So if you're going to do five bucks a day, that's a hundred days Well, you could do 500 bucks in one day. They'll spend the money if they can.
Speaker 1:The beauty of doing it over time is that you can kind of adjust. You have tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg that you can put on your website or wherever you're driving the traffic to and you can pay attention to what they're doing if they're purchasing, if they're not purchasing, if they're opting in, if it's an opt-in so you can see what's happening. You can tweak it as you go, but let's say you do $5 a day or $10 a day, whatever you want to do, you know that's 50 to 100 days of running traffic. That will give you feedback and you'll be able to see what happens, right, you'll be able to see how many leads you actually got for that, how many new subscribers you got, how many profile views you got did, did video views? Did that change? How many opt-ins, how many people click your profile link. So you have to be willing to to essentially run a campaign and then see what the results are and what you could tweak.
Speaker 1:For case in point, let's say you you want to spend 500 bucks and you're going to do 10 bucks a day. So 50 days we're going're going to run this and at the end of it we spent 500, we made $400, right. Technically we've lost a hundred bucks, right. But let's say those $400 came from two sales. We have two $200 sales and that's what our product is. It's 200 bucks and that's what our product is. It's 200 bucks, 197, 199, whatever, but it's essentially 200 bucks. That's awesome. But you're going to see it as a failure. I lost money, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1:It's feedback, and the feedback is well, what would our conversions need to be? So what could we potentially change? And again, if you have a conversion tracking software on and you're paying attention to what people are doing, you might already know the five things you could improve in order to increase conversions. So that's on the simplest level. But what if we didn't increase conversions? What if we just increased the amount of money they gave us? If the value of the customer was $250 instead of $200, we would have broken even right. If it was $300 value per customer, we would have broken even right. If it was 300 value per customer, we would have made $100 profit. So can you add an upsell in there, right? Or can you increase the price of your product and keep the conversions the same? What if you had a payment plan to your model? Because right now you only have one option it's $200. So you have to look at it and take the feedback from the campaigns and then assess and then test again and really, if you look at it in, here's my budget how much money I have to spend on this. I'm going to run a series of tests. Each test is going to give me feedback, providing I make the changes and it improves the process. By the end of this, I'm going to have a profitable funnel that I can then pour money into right.
Speaker 1:Because the reality is is most people fail because they run ads to get traffic. They get traffic. It doesn't convert the way they think it should. They say the traffic's bad, so they go well, that didn't work. Well, the traffic's not necessarily bad. It might not be targeted correctly, it might not be to the people specifically you wanted.
Speaker 1:But here's what happens with advertising. If you do it right. Let's say you have a lead magnet and you're driving traffic to it from an ad and you drive 500 people, you get 100 opt-ins, right. So 20% conversion. That's pretty good for cold traffic. So you get 20% conversion Fantastic, all right.
Speaker 1:But you don't have anything on the back end. You've just proven concept, right. So now you've got to sell. So you have 100 people you want to sell something to. So now you've got to sell. So you have 100 people you want to sell something to.
Speaker 1:Well, what if you didn't have the opt-in in place of the sales page and you just drove traffic straight to the sales page? Now you have 500 views versus 100 views, because you went through the gate right, and so there's so many ways to look at it, there's so many ways to look at it, there's so many ways to assess it, and the biggest thing to understand is what's the end goal. And then work backwards and say, okay, everything is just information. And so if you understand what a good conversion rate is, if I'm getting 20% in an opt-in, I probably aren't going to worry too much about trying to tweak that opt-in. If then, out of the 100 people that actually opted in, only one person purchased, so it's a 1% conversion, let's say I thought I should be getting a 5% conversion, well, there's a lot more opportunity there to focus than there is on the opt-in, right. And so then we go okay, how do we look at that? And, like I said, maybe we remove the opt-in, we get 500 people. So we test that. Nope, didn't make a difference, we still got the one sale.
Speaker 1:Okay, there's a disconnect between the ad, the opt-in and then the sales page. So we need more pre-framing, more pre-selling. What do we do? Right? And that's how you have to think of things. You have to think of things and break it down in segments and in paths and say that's good enough. What's the thing that's not good enough? Where's the biggest opportunities? What can we tweak? Because sometimes all it takes is one tweak and you have a profitable campaign, but so many people give up before that.
Speaker 1:So running ads absolutely To me, that's the fastest way to get exposure right, because instead of having to hope for a video to go viral or something like that, you can literally tell the platforms hey matter. I want people this age who are interested in this, and so they should put it in front of those people, versus you hoping that it ends up in front of those people. And you know. And then as you grow, you can either keep the ads or a lot of people get to a point where they don't need to run ads anymore because the organic is bringing enough traffic, enough sales, that the the advertising becomes an expensive sale. You know because you're buying the ads and there's costs associated to it. So I get it.
Speaker 1:But honestly, in the beginning, you know time is, people trade their time.
Speaker 1:But if you're creating tons of content and nobody's seeing it, you'd have been better off creating one piece of content and driving traffic to it.
Speaker 1:So just keep that in mind and understand that you don't have to spend a lot of money on advertising to get started, but, like if you're spending five bucks a day for 100 days, I would almost guarantee that it's going to help in some way shape or form, not to mention the video views as they go up.
Speaker 1:The video views as they go up and and if people are engaged and people are liking them because hopefully your content is good, like, you're going to pick up organic traffic from that too, because the the algorithm will will say, oh, people enjoying this video, the watch time is going up, um, therefore, we want to share this with other people for free. So even when you run ads, you can benefit from organic there. So hopefully that gives you some starting point. Didn't confuse you too much, but it's definitely something I would throw in, especially, especially if you've been doing this for a while and you just not seem to be getting more views. The algorithms, the platforms it's a constant battle and for some reason sometimes it's. You know your content doesn't even get showed to your own followers. So I would definitely say explore that, you know again, set a budget, how much are you willing to invest, and then from there you can figure out if it does work or not work for you, and then what you would do next.
Speaker 2:Nice Thanks, man. Yeah, I was looking at Nicole's stuff and it's interesting that she said in her question that she's starting from scratch, when by all appearances she's been working pretty hard at this for a little while.
Speaker 1:So I thought that there might be another tactical step, and I imagine people say they're starting from scratch when they don't have a big following or they're not necessarily monetizing yet. Right, so it makes total sense. But hopefully today's episode will help a few of you guys out. As always, we appreciate you being here. Give today's episode. It will help a few of you guys out. As always, we appreciate you being here. Give us a like, subscribe, leave a review if you feel so inclined. We'd love to see that.
Speaker 2:And we'll see you next time on Paid to Create. Bye guys.
